[j1elo]

If you learn to program with Node.js, one chapter of your tutorial will be to show that NPM is "THE repository for Node packages".

For me, it is part of what makes some of these technologies leaders of what they do. If Node.js has NPM; Rust has Crates.io; and Debian has their repos, why wouldn't Docker have DockerHub? From my POV of 100% user of these technologies, it just seems natural (or at least that's just what they have made us to expect).

Actually what doesn't seem natural is if NPM suddenly deleted old package versions just mere months after they didn't get any download. I know we're talking about containers, which take more disk space than a NPM package... but still, that policy change from Docker Hub felt odd. Now we have to worry about regularly refresh the containers we care about.

(regarding the mantra "you should rebuild them anyway", well, when you want to reproduce a bug, you don't need to rebuild old packages in other repositories, right?)